LAB 045: Do Not Disturb Part I
About This Lab
HAPPY NEW YEAR FRIENDS!!
It is 2022 and resolutions are at the front of everyone’s minds trying to figure out ways to improve ourselves. So to start the the new year we are having a series of labs focused on improving your overall health and wellness. The first part of the series is all about sleep and its such an important topic that we have made it into two parts.
Sleeping is something that we all do , but we all have very different relationships with sleep. One thing that we know is that as a society we don’t get enough sleep. The US Sleep Foundation reports that almost half of Americans say they feel sleepy during the day and 35.2% of all adults in the U.S. report sleeping on average for < 7 hours per night. So, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our sleep habits. Ariana Huffington has talked about the importance of sleep and even wrote a book about it, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, one Night At a Time. The Calm app and Audible both provide hundreds guided meditations and sleep stories, some of which are narrated by celebrities like Tabitha Brown, Diddy, Harry Styles, and Emma Stone.
In Part I, we are diving into what constitutes a good nights sleep, the stages of sleep, and what exactly is happening during each stage.
Experts recommend getting 8 hours of sleep in order to have “a good nights sleep”. To get a good nights sleep very specific things have to happen and you have to make it through all the stages of sleep.
Dr. Jean-Louis talks us through each stage of sleep starting with when we are awake , this is the beta stage. During this stage there brain waves are fast and low voltage. When we are prepping for sleep this is called the alpha stage, during this stage our brain waves have a lower frequency and the voltage is higher. Then we progress into deep sleep, this stage is called delta sleep and when we start REM (rapid eye movement). In REM our brain waves have a high amplitude and the frequency is very low, this is when we dream and Dr. Girardin Jean-Louis says that we typically have 4-5 dream episodes. Do you remember your dreams when you wake up? Maybe this is a topic for another lab…
If you get to delta sleep and have uninterrupted delta sleep you should wake up feeling refreshed and energized. So many important things are happening while we sleep, our bodies are healing which is why doctors always recommend bed rest after anything traumatic to the body. We are also removing toxins from the brain. These toxins are call a-beta and tau and are linked to Alzheimer’s and dementia.
There are some folks that are rarely get restful sleep because of any number of sleep disorders or because of psychosocial factors. Studies have shown that people of color are not only spending less time on average in deep sleep, they are also taking longer to fall asleep, and wake up more during the night.
In Part II, we get into the nitty gritty of sleep disorder and what we can do to get a better nights sleep. Make sure you tune in!
Guest Experts
Dr. Girardin Jean-Louis and he is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Miami at the Miller School of Medicine.